Globalisation: past and present. Members of a joint archaeological team from Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates, China (the Palace Museum and Jilin University) and the UK (Durham University) discuss the excavation of a Julfar ware jar at the al-Mataf archaeological site in Ras al-Khaimah, 2019. Julfar ware, an earthenware, was locally produced between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries CE. Al-Mataf was a port serving the prominent pearling town of Julfar, strategically located close to the Strait of Hormuz, which links the Arabian Gulf with the Indian Ocean. Julfar ware and al-Mataf were caught up in flourishing maritime trade, as were glass bangles and Chinese porcelain which were imported to the site. Photograph by Prof. Wang Guangyao, reproduced with kind permission, with thanks to Dr Ran Zhang for assistance.
Enlightenment: past and present. Students from Tribhuvan University, Lumbini Buddhist University and staff from the Government of Nepal's Department of Archaeology and Lumbini Development Trust, alongside archaeologists from Durham University's UNESCO Chair on Archaeological Ethics and Practice in Cultural Heritage, excavating the monumental northern gateway of the palatial compound within the ancient city of Tilaurakot-Kapilavastu, Nepal, in 2016. Supported by the Japanese-Funds-in-Trust-for-UNESCO, scientific dating has uncovered that the city was first occupied in the ninth century BCE, with the fluorescence of settlement up to the second century CE, plus later phases of activity and building. The city has recently been nominated by the Government of Nepal for UNESCO World Heritage Site status. It is one of the main candidates for ancient Kapilavastu, the capital of the Sakya Kingdom and where Prince Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, spent 29 years of his life before leaving through the city's eastern gate to reject his life of luxury and begin his spiritual journey to enlightenment. A major Buddhist pilgrimage destination, it is also of ritual importance to local communities, containing a shrine dedicated to the deity Samai Mai. Photograph by Durham UNESCO Chair, reproduced with kind permission, with thanks to Dr Christopher Davis and Prof. Robin Coningham for assistance.
Crawford's review of archaeology
Successive editors of Antiquity have begun by looking to O.G.S. Crawford's founding mission to guide their vision for the journal, while acknowledging the achievements of their immediate predecessor and their own unworthiness for the task ahead. Nearly a century on from Crawford's first ‘Editorial Notes’, that tradition still holds value. Why? Because Antiquity is a journal that we—its editors, authors, reviewers, readers, board members, staff, publishers and librarians—still care deeply about. Above all, we want to be assured, and to help ensure, that its hard-won reputation for presenting—accessibly—a worldwide selection of top-quality archaeological research to a broad readership will be sustained. For a new editor, that is a daunting and exciting responsibility.
Antiquity's history has been narrated repeatedly—and more will follow when we mark the centenary in 2027. A wealth of detail and insight exists about its achievements, especially in the special section published in the journal, ‘Celebrating 75 years of Antiquity’Footnote 1. This largely hagiographic literature has constructed an epic history, populated by great (mostly male, all white and British) editors, loyally assisted by a band of auxiliaries (often wives), on quests to secure ‘scoops’ and subscribers, ending always in the timely delivery of the next eagerly awaited issue—the renown of the journal ever more lustrous. Despite this spin, it is well worth experiencing Antiquity's history first-hand in the pages of the 402 past issues of the journal, available via our website (https://antiquity.ac.uk/) and Cambridge Core (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/all-issues). Instead of retelling this institutional story, I restrict myself here to evaluating the mission of Antiquity as expressed by its successive editors and by commentators on their work, not least as a platform upon which to set out my own stall. Praise should not be denied, nor should critical reflection.
Supporters of the journal have documented the leading role played by its founding editor, O.G.S. Crawford, between 1927 and his death in 1957. Crawford himself supplied much of the script through editorial recollections and an autobiography. What he had in mind at the beginning was “a quarterly review of archaeology”Footnote 2 that would become the organ of a group of archaeologists who were working to raise the status of British archaeology, both at home and “looking out from England to the world”Footnote 3. Aimed at the general public, its style was to be journalistic and popularising, but also authoritative, so as to “create a sound and informed body of opinion”Footnote 4. Current archaeological discoveries, interpretations and books were therefore not simply to be described but were also to be reviewed critically, particularly when it came to “the work of those who are recreating the past”Footnote 5. Indeed, “righteous indignation” became a characteristic feature of Crawford's Antiquity editorials.Footnote 6 In the process, the journal successfully tapped into and helped shape the coming-of-age of British archaeologyFootnote 7, so that by 1946 Crawford was content to admit that “Antiquity has become an institution”Footnote 8 and, by 1955, that its basis was uniquely “world-wide”Footnote 9.
The editorial baton was passed to Glyn Daniel in 1958, who flourished it until his retirement in 1986. He “was determined to keep Antiquity as it had been in Crawford's time, a scholarly journal suitable for reading by the general public”Footnote 10, which would showcase “all relevant developments in the world of archaeological learning”Footnote 11. He undoubtedly achieved this, “firmly establishing Antiquity as the leading journal of world archaeology”Footnote 12, while also distinguishing it with his witty and critical “Editorial rumblings and bumblings”Footnote 13 about past people and present-day archaeologists.
Daniel's student and successor, Christopher Chippindale, further extended the scope of Antiquity between 1987 and 1997. He intentionally made Antiquity into a world archaeology journalFootnote 14, notably expanding coverage of Australia and the Pacific, while also engaging with relevant ethical issues and encouraging younger scholars to publish in the journal. This was the Antiquity I grew up with, archaeologically, as a doctoral student and post-doc, and it is this version of the journal that I still look back to.
Henry Cleere stood in as editor in 1992, while Chippindale was on sabbatical. He wrote mainly about archaeological heritage but, to his credit, also defended the journal's openness to theoretical archaeologyFootnote 15—a tradition that continues today.
By the time that Caroline Malone and Simon Stoddart swapped editorships, between 1998 and 2002, Antiquity was old enough to commemorate both its impact on the discipline of archaeologyFootnote 16 and established enough to be eulogised from North American perspectives, not simply as “one of the world's premier publications in archaeology”Footnote 17 but also as a place of unchecked archaeological eclecticism that “nourishes the world archaeological community”Footnote 18.
Martin Carver loyally began in 2003 by assuring readers that “the editorial policy remains the same as it has for the last 75 years”Footnote 19, while unsentimentally reformatting the journal and rededicating it “to diversity, in the present as well as the past”Footnote 20. Similar to, but also different from, Christopher Chippindale's proposition of Antiquity as a world journal made coherent by a “common spirit in Anglophone archaeology, beyond the common language”Footnote 21, Carver's ambition was to “provide a stage for new work from under-represented subjects, places and periods … not just to see tenets of modern theory applied globally, but to hear the varied international voices of archaeological research expressing their own ideas and ethos” and “to help archaeologists who do not normally write in English … since to think only in English may restrict the way we think about the past”Footnote 22. That these important goals remained in part aspirational is perhaps indicated by Carver's closing editorial in 2012, reminding readers that “Antiquity is a global, not a British journal”Footnote 23 and by admonishing authors to write about the “global significance” of their workFootnote 24.
Chris Scarre credited his predecessor with “successfully encouraging contributions from authors from a wider and wider range of international backgrounds and institutions”Footnote 25, and kept this objective in mind himself as editor between 2013 and 2017Footnote 26, along with ensuring that the journal remained accessible and comprehensible to an international readership. Both he and his own successor, Robert Witcher, also began by reassuring their readers that, for Antiquity, the “mission remains unchanged”.Footnote 27 Their success in achieving this is partly reflected in the fact that the journal continues to be perceived by most academic archaeologists as a particularly prestigious one.Footnote 28 I therefore acknowledge sincerely the dedicated work of my predecessors in passing on what has become today so much more than just a ‘high-impact journal’.
Taking my cue from Crawford and Daniel, whose editorials were characteristically critical, albeit of others’ deficiencies, it is surely healthy to ingest a dose of their medicine. For Antiquity comes with baggage. Some of this has already begun to be unpacked, so I shall lend a hand.
Brian Fagan, who heaped much praise on the journal, also observed in the early 1990s that “Antiquity does still have somewhat of an image problem, especially among Americans, who tend to think of it as a somewhat British, tweedy product”Footnote 29. This view was later echoed by Timothy Kohler, who reflected that “Antiquity, especially in the Glyn Daniel years, seems a trifle clubby to the American reader”Footnote 30. Fagan therefore called on the editors to “eschew parochial British and European interests”Footnote 31—“If I read one more editorial on Stonehenge, I will scream!”Footnote 32—and to bring in “guest editorials from Africa, India, or South America, so that the perspective rotates to different regions”Footnote 32, in order that, through Antiquity, “future generations of archaeological professionals can explore the wider world of the past and feel comfortable”Footnote 31. It was from this perspective, and specifically in advocating the decolonisation of Greek and Roman archaeology, that Nicola Terrenato damned Antiquity with faint praise: “Good journals reflect current discourse, excellent ones anticipate it. Antiquity has often been ahead of its times and can be so again.”Footnote 33
These early appeals for diversity and inclusion have since been taken seriously, first by Martin Carver, and more recently by Robert Witcher, who argued in his first editorial that: “To bring our readers the best archaeological research, we need to showcase an even broader and more representative range of the work going on around the world … and a greater range of voices.”Footnote 34 Commissioned by Antiquity's Trustees, Witcher, together with Emily Hanscam, has undertaken a gender analysis of submissions to Antiquity between 1990 and 2020, revealing “an improving but still marked underrepresentation of female authors”Footnote 35, with “a recurrent ratio of one female for every two male authors”Footnote 36. (The 2021‒2022 data indicate continued improvement, but only by one percentage point.Footnote 37) English language also continues to be a stumbling block, which I intend to return to in a future editorial. Suffice to say that it is not so much the quality of the words used by authors for whom English is a secondary language that is at fault, but the colonially infused mindset and writing of some of Antiquity's ancestral authors that still needs to be confronted. For example, although well intentioned, Crawford's advocacy of an anthropological archaeology employed words and categories we would not use today: “Some familiarity with the habits and outlook of primitive communities is essential. In fact, your ‘savage’ is himself the ideal archaeologist and excavator; for he is familiar with primitive appliances, and can often explain the use of objects which baffle the ‘expert’.”Footnote 38
One step along the path towards decolonising Antiquity, and archaeology more widely, is to acknowledge the positionality of the author. This includes that of the current editor (another white, British, cis man, albeit a multilingual one) relative to some previous editors who expressed the opinion that Antiquity is and should be a journal rooted in a broadly British archaeological tradition, communicating via the English language to the Anglophone world. That worldview must now be turned upside down, although it is easier said than done. In recent years I have learnt so much through working with a growing diversity of students, early career researchers and heritage professionals in and beyond Europe. In addition to my collaborative research and development work on museum education in Jordan (Figure 1), and my endeavours in establishing partnerships with Chinese universities and museums (Figure 2), most impactful has been my involvement with the ‘Rewriting World Archaeology’ mentoring programme, sponsored by the Antiquity Trust and The British Academy, which spans South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and is inspired by mentors such as Innocent Pikirayi who continue to call for barriers to be broken downFootnote 39 (Figure 3). Robert Witcher has previously introduced this programme in an editorial and has led it admirably, in principle and in practice.Footnote 40 Suffice to say, then, that these engagements have fundamentally changed my perspective on the contradictory global networks we populate.
Pupils from Balquees Primary School, Amman, visiting the Jordan Archaeological Museum in Amman in 2023—accompanied by teachers, museum staff and heritage professionals—as part of a research and development programme in Jordan designed to engage young people in museum learning. Photograph from the project ‘Learning from Multicultural Amman: Engaging Jordan's Youth’.
Research students from Jingdezhen Ceramic University and professional archaeologists visiting the excavation of a kaolin quarry connected to the porcelain industry at Gaoling National Mining Park, China, in 2024. Photograph from Jingdezhen Ceramic University, reproduced with permission, with thanks to Yimei Jiang for assistance.
Mentors and mentee, Robin Skeates, Ruth Wafang, Innocent Pikirayi and Susan Philistus Muzivi, visiting the Supreme Court of Kenya in Nairobi, during the 2024 ‘Rewriting World Archaeology: Africa’ workshop. Photograph by Robert Witcher, reproduced with permission.
But how far should Antiquity walk the talk of decolonisation? Mindful of Fagan's scream, could a confident next step be to remove the journal's Stonehenge logo—that enduring English emblem “of a megalithic quality”Footnote 41—branded onto each published article from around the world, or its European dolmen logo embedded within each editorial? And should further practical acts aim to rebalance power relations, acknowledge and apologise for past wrongs, and attempt restitution? It is worth remembering that such questions and debates are not new.
Flows and frictions
Antiquity's authors have arguably already begun paving the way towards decolonising the journal, particularly by contributing some complex alternative histories to established discussions of globalisation, colonialism and world religions (for example, Frontispieces 1 & 2). Influential rhetoric of ‘centre-periphery’ and of ‘flow’Footnote 42 is gradually being replaced by more sophisticated archaeological accounts that acknowledge smaller-scale processes and disruptive agents. These enable us to reconsider mobilities and connectivities, as well as differences, inequalities and failures, and the parts played in these by people and their cultural materials over multiple scales in the past. This is very much an ongoing archaeological task, as highlighted by Marion Uckelmann's recent New Book Chronicle in Antiquity on ‘Mobility and trade in the past’.Footnote 43 Such studies also have the potential to help us reflect on our own shifting positions in relation to contemporary global and local networks. Engagement with these interpretative challenges is evident across all the research articles included in this issue of Antiquity, despite the specifics of their archaeological materials, methods and cultures.
One of the articles deals with the archaeological phenomenon known as the ‘Uruk expansion’, which is marked by the extensive appearance of Uruk-related material culture across greater Mesopotamia during the second half of the fourth millennium BC, and has—since the 1960s—been taken to reflect a combination of direct colonisation and extensive trade of goods initiated by state societies in southern Mesopotamia. It has even been described as “the world's earliest known colonial network”.Footnote 44 Claudia Glatz and colleagues, however, present archaeological evidence for a counter-narrative, based on a bottom-up perspective. At the settlement site of Shakhi Kora in north-east Iraq, a sequence of Late Chalcolithic households, followed by abandonment and population dispersal, is interpreted in terms of the regional rejection by local communities of a first experiment with urbanism and centralised forms of social and economic organisation.
Another article in the current issue extends the discussion of colonisation to the Andes. Here, historical accounts of sudden rupture and total culture change following the Spanish invasion and colonisation are also beginning to be replaced by archaeological examples of Indigenous people resisting, incorporating and shaping Spanish interventions. Alexander Hunter's article contributes to this stance by questioning the timing and form of Spanish colonial transformations of an Inka royal estate at Ollantaytambo in the Cusco region of Peru. Botanical data from a derelict reservoir indicate that, following the Spanish invasion of the region in 1532, inter-connected local farming communities maintained the elaborate irrigated and terraced agricultural landscape for decades, and that only around the end of the sixteenth century was the agroecology restructured by de-intensified colonial land management, new forms of landownership, the introduction of non-native plants and animals, and demographic changes. It is ironic that the cultural landscape this replaced was itself an imperial one.
Another form of environmental colonialism is taking place today in northern Sweden, as described by Ingela Bergman and colleagues in this issue. For the Indigenous Sámi, the boreal forests are vibrant, as exemplified by Scots pine trees marked over 300 years ago with incisions of social and religious significance. These low-intensity cultural landscapes are now being destroyed by industrial forestry at an alarming rate. It is yet to be seen, however, whether the calls of Sámi communities, environmentalists and archaeologists for the protection of the remaining ecosystems and their modified trees will be heeded by the forests’ current owners.
In other articles in the February issue, flows of people and things are also reconsidered—critically but less politically. According to an investigation by Andrés Troncoso and colleagues of three Terminal Pleistocene‒Early Holocene (c. 12 000‒10 000 BP) rock-shelter sites in north-central Chile, the earliest human occupation of inland areas of the southern Andes is likely to have been a more exploratory, transitory and gradual process than the term ‘colonisation’ is often taken to imply. Interpretative scenarios involving the southward spread of the Pastoral Neolithic along the Middle Nile Valley (c. 5600‒3800 BC), through population migration and cultural diffusion, are also put to the test in Joel Irish and Jacek Kabaciński's study of biological and cultural variation, the results of which call for more nuanced explanations. We return to the Uruk phenomenon's long-distance movement and accounting of goods in Kathryn Kelley and colleagues’ study of the evolution of symbolic conventions used on seals, clay sealings for jars and on proto-cuneiform tablets, including fringed textile motifs and signs. Later cuneiform tablets also indicate the continued importance of textile production and trade in the Old Assyrian Colony and Hittite periods in Anatolia (2000‒1200 BC), of which rare burnt fragments found at Beycesultan Höyük are analysed by Çiğdem Maner and colleagues. Understandings of food supply logistics at early cities in the Indus Valley are also reassessed by Nathaniel James and colleagues. Their research into crop processing and dung burning at Harappa in Pakistan (3700‒1300 BC) questions the academic framing of rural populations and practices as peripheral to urban ones. Globally, salt commonly accompanied agricultural, carbohydrate-rich diets. In Central America, sea-salt cakes were first produced by brine boiling at Early Classic (AD 250‒550) Yucatan coastal sites to meet local or down-the-line trade needs, as evidenced by Heather McKillop and Cory Sills's work at Jay-yi Nah in Belize, before production expanded during the Late Classic Maya period (AD 550‒800) to supply increased demand from growing inland populations.
These accounts may give the impression of almost frictionless mobility, trade, social relations and progress, which seem idyllic compared to our own world. Four more articles in the current issue, however, clearly reveal—at the site-scale of analysis—that the establishment and transgressing of boundaries in life and death also impact the trajectories of places, things and social groups. Substantial defensive architecture was constructed at Dmanisis Gora in southern Georgia during the late-second or early-first millennia BC, enclosing a regular sized (1.5ha) residential inner fortress with a double wall and a particularly extensive (56‒80ha) and less intensively occupied outer settlement with additional fortifications. Nathaniel Erb-Satullo and colleagues suggest that the outer protected area could reflect an attempt to entice in a larger population, including a mobile pastoralist segment that gathered at, but also dispersed seasonally from, this ‘fortress settlement’.
In partial contrast, local political aggrandisement, social distinction and spatial segregation are thought by Thomas Saile and colleagues to have motivated the merger of two ditch-enclosed rectangular farmsteads at Landshut-Hascherkeller in south-east Germany during the Hallstatt period (c. 800‒475 BC). Social tensions are also proposed by Rick Schulting and colleagues to explain the exceptionally violent killing and butchery of at least 37 men, women and children and their disposal in a 15m-deep shaft at Charterhouse Warren in south-west England during the Early Bronze Age (c. 2210‒2010 BC)—politically condoned actions that terminated the life cycle of a putative community. Partly informed by compelling contributions such as this to mortuary archaeology, Rennan Lemos argues that the ‘robbing’ and reuse of earlier tombs at Thebes at the end of the New Kingdom and during the Third Intermediate Period (1069‒664 BC) can be reinterpreted in terms of potent ancestral resources being respectfully brought back into circulation.
Déjà vu?
By engaging both with the increasingly global scope of Antiquity and with globalisation in the past—two key themes that are already familiar to readers—I have sought to reveal that my vision for Antiquity combines significant regard for its history and established direction of travel with a sprinkling of disrespect. This slightly more critical and political emphasis stems from my growing commitment to confront the legacies of colonial ideologies and practices. But I accept that a journal and its leader column owe their allegiance to multiple stakeholders, and therefore require empathy and diplomacy as much as opinions on controversial topics that not all readers find relevant.
My action plan for Antiquity requires further discussion with our many board members and supporters. An overarching consideration continues to be with maintaining Antiquity's central position in global archaeology. Antiquity offers ‘a review of world archaeology’ that encompasses the archaeology of all regions, periods and specialisms. Given its prominence, frequency, format, high professional standards and broad readership, Antiquity is arguably the most centrally placed among archaeology journals to deliver this. But, as we are all aware, the world is changing rapidly (in areas such as publishing, climate change and geopolitical instability) and the attitudes of archaeologists with it, including towards established academic institutions based in the ‘Global North’. So, a key question for Antiquity is, how do we maintain our attractiveness and relevance to authors and readers without compromising our reputation and quality?
Here, I believe we are already progressing in many appropriate directions. We are, for example, monitoring the representativeness of our articles and authors in terms of gender, geography and career stage. We are communicating in an even more personalised and supportive way with our diverse authors and peer reviewers. We are updating our guidelines and policies, including our ethics policy. We are diversifying our pool of peer reviewers. We are continuing to edit papers to the highest professional standards, with sensitivity towards authors whose first language is not English. We are contributing to the training and mentoring of early career researchers in different regions of the Global South. And we are actively enhancing the discoverability and impact of our articles through dedicated media and communications work. Indeed, our transition to full Open Access in 2026 will make our content accessible to a less restricted audience, as well as make gaining Open Access funding more equitable for our authors.
Inevitably, there is more that Antiquity can do, including together with our not-for-profit publishing partners at Cambridge University Press, who will be soliciting opinions from you, our audience, in 2025. To further diversify the content of the journal, we will need to reach out further. Possibilities encompass: inviting in a wider range of guest editors and opinion writers; soliciting more articles from early career researchers working at the forefront of archaeology globally; removing national boundaries from maps where they are not relevant to the published research; replacing BC/AD with BCE/CE; providing article abstracts both in English and in a language of choice of the authors; and inviting critical historical research on the foundational texts of archaeology published in Antiquity, including their colonial language and ‘racecraft’. This is a work in progress. For the time being, I thank you sincerely for reading, and my colleagues Cate Frieman, Chris Scarre and Sarah Semple for so supportively commenting on a first draft. This is a work in collaboration.
